Hi everybody! Welcome to podcast #90! Today we are talking about the future of social media – we get asked about this a lot so we decided to share where we see it going. It’s a world that’s constantly changing!

What did Andrew McCauley and Heather Porter learn this week?

Andrew discovered that people are now often sharing videos directly on Facebook rather than sharing via YouTube, which is meaning that YouTube is starting to lose ground to native Facebook video in posts. In the next 4-5 months YouTube will probably be second to Facebook for videos on the newsfeed.

Heather has discovered a channel on YouTube which she’s really enjoying called Awesomeness Fest. It’s great for inspiration and to find people who are keeping it real!

The Future Of Social Media

Facebook

We’re seeing more businesses flag Facebook since there has been less organic traffic and more need for “pay to play”. Copyblogger ditched their page the other day, stating that it is simply not a platform where their engaged followers are hanging out. This was after some fairly strenuous testing to see where they were getting results.

The main problems we see with Facebook:

1. No more organic traffic for business pages.

2. The validity of Facebook ads has been questioned due to link farms. We’ve seen very good results from Facebook advertising, but you really need to know what you’re doing with it.

3. Ads are becoming more difficult to get accepted and their lifetime has reduced drastically to around 24 – 48 hours. This means ad agencies are pulling out of doing them for clients because they have to change them every couple of days, therefore they need to charge a lot more for the service.

LinkedIn is turning into it’s own publishing platform and people who use that platform seem to be getting much more engagement and shares. Andrew also found that posting up as well as participating in group discussions sent his views rocketing up.

We’re also finding that company pages don’t seem to do that well. People are more interested in getting to know a person better. To that end we suggest that your profile is filled out completely and that you take advantage of being able to use images and videos.

YouTube

Name your videos in a way that people search for them, e.g. “How to …”

Ads are developing further and retargeting is also now in use for YouTube.

Next generation…

Instagram, Kick and Snapchat are huge with younger generations. If you want to know what’s coming up, look to the teens! Don’t get caught up in the “old school” social media platforms if your target audience exists within this group…

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